Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa is an assistant professor at Vassar College, where she teaches courses on ancient philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of mental illness. She is a graduate of the philosophy PhD program at MIT, where she wrote a dissertation called, What Imagination Teaches, about the epistemic features of imagination and what the relationship of imagination is to other mental processes. Currently, she continues to conduct research on imagination, and is now also pursuing a second project investigating the epistemic views of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Being trained in the analytic tradition, like many other philosophers I found I was not exposed to a very diversified canon while I was a student. In some ways, this made my own journey as a teacher with diversification goals a bit more challenging. I asked myself how I could ever hope to teach the thoughts of people who I had never formally studied. Nonetheless, I have felt and still feel an intense and important responsibility to amend the gaps in my own education, so that the error, as it were, does not get passed on, and this forced me to be confident that my philosophical sensibilities could generalize sufficiently to compensate.
Two things I have found tremendously helpful in diversifying my teaching have been: (1) not being married to the prose form as the only way of transmitting philosophical argument; (2) finding ways to promote secular interest in what seem to be philosophical arguments steeped in theological commitments; and (3) being uncompromising in a commitment to include readings on women and minority thinkers in every course.
I’ll go through a brief explanation and example of each in turn, in the hopes that this inspires other instructors when building their own syllabi.
Perhaps the largest shift in my thinking about philosophy came when I understood that arguments do not need to be conveyed in prose. Currently, I am researching the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a 17th century nun in New Spain. She is world-famous, but all but unknown in philosophy circles, because she is most celebrated for her poetic and dramatic writings. Nonetheless, one of the reasons I have always been passionate about her work is that she grapples with many philosophical problems, particularly feminist issues, the merit and responsibility of artists in producing aesthetic works, and the general problem of comparative value: is pursuit of intellectual passions, the value of knowledge for its own sake, compatible with or complementary to moral value and value in the divine? Although Sor Juana addresses many of these issues in her prose writings, most of her output, including many of her persuasive argumentation, is in the poetic or dramatic form. Should we rob philosophy of insights into these questions, just because they are not written in prose?
Last year, on the first day of class I introduced my students to the idea that arguments are everywhere by playing them the song “Ramblin’ Man” by the Allman Brothers. I asked my students whether the singer was trying to convince them of anything. They figured, as I figured, that the singer was asking to be forgiven for being unable to stay in one place or, for that matter, with one woman. I asked them what the basis of this forgiveness was meant to be. They answered that the singer claimed he could not help being this way, that he was “born a ramblin’ man”. Here was my argument to them: the thing the singer was trying to convince them of, that he should be forgiven, that was the conclusion. The reasons they were meant to buy the conclusion, that he couldn’t do otherwise, those were premises. If you list all the reasons given before the conclusion, you have an argument. Now, I told them, you can assess this argument for validity, rigor, and general persuasiveness. I then went on to explain to them the difference between arguments that are persuasive because of their logic or reasoning (the kind we most value in philosophy), and arguments that are persuasive because of their emotional features or the character of the speaker (the kind advertisers, politicians, and parents of small children often use the most). In about half an hour, I had blown wide open the possibility of doing philosophy in just about any medium. This gets the students’ attention, first of all, but it also helps me make a point, namely that philosophy focuses on reasons to accept or believe conclusions, and whether those reasons are adequate. It is because of this that philosophers prefer a certain sort of prose style, but it doesn’t mean you couldn’t engage philosophically with other kinds of texts.
Doing (1) with (2), which is taking arguments steeped in theistic language seriously, immediately opens up the possibility of introducing ancient Islamic, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist thought into an otherwise traditional introductory philosophy class. I cover all of the same topics most introductory analytic philosophy courses cover – personal identity, epistemic justification, the problem of induction, free will, the existence of God, and so on – but I try to do it with an eye deliberately trained toward showing off a depth and breadth of traditions that address these problems.
For example, I found a selection of Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyya, a female Sufi mystic from the 9th century, an excellent complement to Pascal’s wager for belief in God: Rabi’a wishes to “light a fire in Paradise and pour water onto Hell, so that both veils may completely disappear from the pilgrims … and the servants of God may see Him, without any object of hope or motive of fear” (Bonevac and Philips, 2009, Introduction to World Philosophy, p. 557). Essentially, Rabi’a is rejecting the instrumentalist reasoning Pascal uses to justify belief in God: for Rabi’a, God “is worthy of worship without any intermediate motive” (ibid). Pascal’s wager, in her view, would fail to get anyone the very thing Pascal’s wager promises. Students find this text helpful to cite, as many of them come up with Rabi’a’s objection to Pascal on their own. Although the text is not in contemporary philosophical style, it is clear that she provides justifications for her views, and that she makes certain assumptions that support these views, which is sufficient for us to find an argument in her text.
My students are also then equipped to begin to see parable as a way of proposing philosophical views. When I talk about Descartes’ methodological skepticism, I take the opportunity to introduce students to Zhuangzi’s more thorough-going skepticism, particularly his butterfly dream. This teaches students both the idea that Descartes was not the first person to wonder whether his experiences really match up to reality (a curious notion that frustratingly sneaks into student papers if no other skeptics are mentioned), and the idea that philosophical questions recur historically, prompted by varying concerns. In many cases, diversifying my syllabus also serves to improve philosophical pedagogy. Challenging students to compare and contrast Zhuangzi’s epistemic and metaphysical commitments with Descartes’ epistemic and metaphysical commitments shakes them out of the idea that similar-looking conclusions necessitate similar premises to support them: while Cartesian skepticism gets its foothold from the potential unreliability of perceptual experience, Zhuangzi is concerned with the variability of perceptual experience and judgments about perceptual experiences. While Descartes thinks knowledge is possible by means of deductive argument, Zhuangzi rejects the possibility of knowledge altogether.
Now, I should really say something about (3), why being uncompromising in a commitment to include readings on women and minority thinkers really helps. Mostly this is because (3) has helped me overcome the new instructor’s two worst enemies when putting together a new course: laziness and fear of inadequacy. I’m teaching a new course in the fall, an introduction to ancient Greek philosophy, the class where most people give up on diversifying their syllabi before they even begin. Because I refused to let myself succumb to this same sense of hopelessness, I asked around and actually got great leads on a number of different resources for teaching undergrads about women thinkers in ancient Greece. In particular, I recommend Sarah Pomeroy’s book, Pythagorean Women, and the excellent series edited by Mary Ellen Waithe, A History of Women Philosophers, both of which I am still working through. Partly because I would like to incorporate these texts into my course, I am going to spend more time teaching Pre-Socratic philosophy than people usually do, which is a “compromise” I am more than happy to make. In addition, although I have not settled this yet, because I know that a lot of women’s writing in ancient Greece was focused on women’s health, I may talk a bit more about Aristotelian theories of biology than is typical in intro courses.
I have to admit that every time I introduce students to a text I never read myself as an undergrad, I feel very scared, and often even with several hours of reading I feel under-prepared. Nonetheless, I have found that the more I teach these texts and subjects, the more comfortable I feel, and the better the response is from the students. The best discovery has been that there are unexpected and very valuable pedagogical gains to be had from shaking up the traditional syllabi.
More than anything, I am glad I don’t have to read another sentence claiming some white guy was the first person to ever think of a big philosophical problem. As I point out to my students, there are all sorts of dead people whose writings we don’t have, so it’s really impossible to make a claim anyone was the first person to think of a philosophical problem. Hopefully, this will help students understand philosophy is an activity all human beings engage in.
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This series of the APA Blog is dedicated to understanding what our fellow philosophers are doing in and out of the classroom to diversify the canon. If you would like to nominate yourself or someone else to write a post for this series, please contact us via the interview nomination form here.
Header image: Depiction of Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyya, Wikimedia Commons
